Lonely and Precocious

by Erika Hammerschmidt

Overview

This was originally part of a collection called "If the World Ended, Would I Notice? and Other Stories." It's being republished as three books.
"Lonely and Precocious" explores the lives of various beings who are kindred spirits to my long-ago self, uncertain to notice the end of the world. They live in their own worlds: failing to notice, struggling to notice, noticing in unique ways, or sometimes just choosing not to notice, what the World Outside is up to.
These stories do not all deal with the end of a world, but they all feature worlds that are deeply transformed from the one we know. And each one faces the specter of an end, to be faced or averted, whether it’s the end of the story’s world or just the end of a character’s worldview.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164849061
Publisher:	Erika Hammerschmidt
Publication date:	03/13/2021
Series:	If The World Ended
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

I am an autistic author, artist and speaker. I give speeches to schools and support groups, telling the story of how I grew up as an alien on earth.

I was diagnosed with various neurological disorders around the age of 11, but labels aren't everything to me. We are all individuals, and a diagnosis is just one of humanity's flawed but natural attempts to arrange the world into categories that seem neat and orderly. It's language, and as much as I love language, it is not a perfect way of describing reality. There is no perfect way. No word's definition is universally agreed upon. No written definition can perfectly encompass the idea expressed by a word. And some ideas can't even be expressed by words in the first place.

What I am can be described partially by the words "Autism," "Asperger Syndrome," and "Tourette Syndrome," with their definitions as printed in the 1992 edition of the DSM-IV, as they were interpreted by my childhood psychiatrist... but really, individual people all have their own unique mental conditions. Mine works for me right now, with or without labels. I see no need to change.